(Photo by Chris Briggs / Unsplash)
In a recent conversation with a colleague working on economic development in Baton Rouge, we were stunned to hear the story of Lousiania’s newly incorporated City of St. George.
After a decade of organizing and now with the support of the Louisiana Supreme Court, residents of the whiter, wealthier East Baton Rouge effectively seceded from the larger city under the guise of wanting better schools for their children. Not only will this redistricting re-segregate schools in the region, it will also cost Baton Rouge residents millions of dollars in tax revenues — critical to infrastructure and social services — and further complicate efforts to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis in Louisiana.
Localism and local control have long been central to American democracy. But not all localism is the same, nor is it necessarily benevolent.
While new economy movements seek to enhance local control and self-determination in the name of collective empowerment, many conservative movements have used localism to perpetuate racist policies and practices. What does this latter kind of localism look like? And, how might we make that distinction explicit, both definitionally and in practice, for movements that seek to build equitable and inclusive local economies?
The differences, we believe, are in unequal participation, the issue of scale and the end goal of economic transformation. A movement toward local ownership cannot be confused with a discriminatory sort of isolationism. Instead, advocacy for local control and governance must be rooted in an understanding that regional solidarity economy ecosystems are the essential building blocks for global economic transformation.
“Localism” taken to the extreme
Though Baton Rouge may be the most recent case, it’s sadly not the only place dealing with these kinds of secession tactics.
Hiding behind arguments of local control to improve schools, more than 120 communities across the country have attempted to create separate school districts since 2000, with at least 47 succeeding. These localities are part of a landscape of numerous movements, from electoral redistricting to state preemption, that weaponize jurisdictional boundaries for exclusionary — and often racist — purposes.
Most of these break-away school districts are whiter and more affluent, taking past patterns of white flight a step further by redrawing jurisdictional boundaries, thereby calcifying segregation and racial inequalities. The result, of course, is that the school districts left behind have fewer resources to address the increasing needs of their predominantly BIPOC, low-income student populations.
These moves don’t just handicap school districts and penalize poor children. They take millions of dollars in property tax off the books for cities and localities already struggling to make ends meet. Municipalities with dated infrastructure lack the capital needed to address existing issues from potholes to water quality, let alone build more resilient systems to weather the effects of climate change. The reduced tax base hollows out the local government, making it even more difficult to provide services for residents and govern effectively.
What’s the difference between this and the local economic systems we encourage? Aren’t residents of St. George simply exercising their constitutional rights and building economic self-determination?
In some ways, yes. But applauding civic participation that moves us toward a sort of atomized localism that reifies structural racism is not only morally reprehensible, it actively threatens our chances to live and participate in a democratic economy.
Rather than solving issues of fiscal mismanagement, these secessionist movements actually ossify poor governance and undermine democracy in the places they leave behind, limiting our collective ability to address structural inequalities head-on and develop the solutions needed for human flourishing.
The real problem with “localism”
The first problem with arguments for localism that are agnostic to inequality is that they fail to consider the precursor to local control and, ultimately, ownership: equal participation.
Participation in democratic processes requires time and access — rare commodities in poor communities and communities of color, a byproduct of the increasing racial wealth gap. It also requires inclusion, transparency and the opportunity to participate in the first place. In Baton Rouge, most residents on the Blacker North and West sides of the city were against the secession. Yet here we are.
Second, the compounding crises we are confronting – crises that deepen inequality and its attendant ills – do not adhere to jurisdictional boundaries. Distributed issues that have broad social impact must be managed at scales commensurate to the level of impact and need. Climate change is not only affecting Baton Rouge residents, but all of Louisiana, the Deep South, the United States and beyond. Ultimately, global action will be necessary to steer clear of climate catastrophe. But this must be done in a tiered and collaborative way.
Efforts to democratize economies via local ownership must consider scale, deliberately connecting the grassroots to structures that can help place-based successes to scale. Put simply, to address many of the structural drivers of inequality — from capital allocation and resource management to infrastructure design — we cannot just think about the local scale exclusively.
Ultimately, the goal of all local economic change efforts must be tied to the overarching goal of broad-scale economic transformation. We can no longer afford to tinker at the edges of capitalism, especially when the stakes are this high.
Grassroots efforts will remain marginal if they cannot confront institutions of power. While we build alternative models of economic ownership, we must also reclaim and democratize the existing institutions of our economy — especially government — so they are more responsive to and reflective of the people they are intended to serve. If we fail to do so, divide-and-marginalize strategies will continue to fragment and disenfranchise communities, hoard resources and power, and handicap movements for change.
The St. George train has already left the station. So what do we do with those who are left behind?
Community Wealth Building: Moving toward broad-scale economic transformation
When we consider economic development strategy, we often see racial equity as a “nice to have,” a positive externality of the work. But, when American wealth inequality is inextricably connected to racial injustice, race must be central to economic transformation.
The framework of Community Wealth Building offers one way to pursue this kind of transformation. It’s an economic development strategy that focuses on broad-based, democratic ownership of economic assets — land, labor, capital — to ensure that all people can share in wealth that is generated.
Community Wealth Building connects and scales grassroots action that advances economic self-determination across five pillars of a local economy: action such as cooperatives and land trusts. It reconfigures our economic system’s modus operandi in direct response to the centuries of extraction and exploitation of BIPOC communities. As articulated by Charli Cooksey, founder of WEPOWER in St. Louis, Missouri, “Our work is racial equity work, not just centering racial equity work.”
What might America look like if our economies created wealth through local ownership in a way that honored racial equity? We can catch a glimpse of this future in St. Louis and Atlanta.
In a 2023 report, the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative found that while “Atlanta holds an enduring reputation as the center of Black political power and Black professional class success…stubborn racial and economic inequities have persisted…[M]ore than a third of [Atlanta’s Black households] have zero or negative net worth.” St. Louis shares a similar context. This context is critical to both the process and outcomes of both the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative and WEPOWER.
In Atlanta, AWBI is shaping a wealth building strategy that responds to community need. When its team learned that Black families in the city had lost an estimated $1 billion due to issues like poor land title transfers, AWBI provided grant-based capital to The Guild, an organization reclaiming land in the city for community ownership. That land is used by viable minority-owned small businesses at risk of displacement to establish or maintain brick-and-mortar retail locations in Atlanta. It’s a powerful example of localism with broad-scale economic transformation as the outcome.
In St. Louis, equal participation was a critical precursor to designing WEPOWER’s Community Wealth Building strategy. Across a six-month participatory, community-centered design process, the organization worked with community members and partners to reimagine its accelerator and investment fund. Across more than 1,000 community engagements, poor and working-class Black and Latinx community members engaged in true reflective dialogue, grappling with the history, narrative and currency of our economy. After 2,000 hours of listening and learning, WEPOWER emerged with a shared vision and theory of change and a set of 70 collectively developed “solutions” to enact that change. This collaboration between the city and county of St. Louis demonstrates a commitment to equal participation in action as well as the necessity of scale.
By grounding racial equity while advancing community ownership at different scales, these examples of Community Wealth Building show that local solutions can enhance participation, empower local control and grow our collective wealth — rather than excluding, marginalizing and exploiting. What St. Louis and Atlanta are modeling lays the groundwork for wholesale economic transformation rooted in justice.